Many Mansions

by Isabel Bolton

  The old were in it as well as the young! Plenty of old ladies. They got about in the most gallant fashion—joined up in the macabre procession; birds of a peculiar feather. One saw them everywhere with their permanent waves, their little hats set on their heads at such rakish and ridiculous angles, their coats and shoes and handbags following the prevailing fashion, tottering in and out of shops and restaurants. How avid and excited they appeared as though they wished to let you know they had their own important engagements to meet like anybody else. Life seemed to jostle and push the poor old things around; pretty exposed they somehow were. The family offered them no shelter or asylum. If they had sons or daughters or great-nephews or grandchildren they did not share their homes and even if they had been invited to do so would the independent old things have accepted such an invitation? Where were they housed? How did they manage it all? The restaurants were full of them. What with the vitamins and the excitement, the movies, and the radio, the prevailing atmosphere of carnival and cocktail bar, the buffeting and the exposure didn’t seem to kill them off.

  It was, she remembered, under the influence of a dry martini—sipping it alone in the Armenian place on Fourth Avenue that she had picked up poor Adam Stone. There he’d sat buried in his book, his sullen, rather beautiful face looking extremely self-conscious. And why not? For he was, she had discovered, perusing Dante’s Inferno. What a pity, she had thought, that she was not young and charming, for she could read Italian too and this might have been one of those daydreams in which she guessed the young man beguiled his lonely condition come delightfully to life. “I see you’re reading Dante,” she had said; and when he’d taken in the situation—her ancient face together with the dry martini—he’d been quite naturally as rude as possible. However, she’d persisted. She had her ways with young men; she was not without intelligence. They had entered into conversation. Every time they had met they had continued to converse. And now, although he would not for the world admit this was the case, she helped very substantially in mitigating the solitude that overtook him in his all too frequent girl-less intervals.

  Poor Adam, she reflected, examining her tray to make sure the breakfast she had now prepared was properly assembled; she’d not seen him for several months—he’d as likely as not found himself another girl and more than probably moved to a new address.

  It occurred to her as she carried the tray into the bedroom, seating herself at the desk, that she would not be able to tell Mr. Breckenridge where to get in touch with him in the event of her demise. To think of making a young man her heir whose address she did not even know. Dear me, dear me, the anonymity of people’s lives.

  Anonymous was the word for everyone—anonymous. Why, the precious self was shattered, blown to bits a thousand times a day and it was actually the case that there was something of insolence, a kind of effrontery about it if anyone presumed to have an assured assertive self—opinions, a personality of one’s own. It was incumbent on us all to do so many turns and tricks in adapting to thoughts, ideas, events, that if one showed oneself incapable of this agility of heart and mind there was a very real danger of lapsing into indifference, lack of sympathy, imagination, as though the poor battered soul were ready to lie down and say I’m beaten, numbed, dead, finished. Listening to all the assorted information, the nerves supplied with the new, the necessary antennae, the soul destroyed by the vibrations; why, the wholesale, the unprecedented calamities of the world cried out to us, shouted aloud every minute of the day. Yet who among us could endure to listen?

  It was too much, too much for anyone she said, thinking as she spoke of her poor Adam. Poor boy, he held out against it all so stubbornly. He was without any knowledge of love; he did not, it seemed to her, understand the meaning of pity. He simply held out against letting it get him down. Such wholesale calamity diminished, dwarfed his little private griefs—the personal grievances and tragedies to which she guessed he clung tenaciously. It was for this reason she imagined he was so obsessed with sex. Out of his curious affairs he got but little joy, unless you could account the strife, the bitter conflict of two egos in their uneasy and anonymous roles attempting to assert their own authority, a kind of cruel self-inflicted pleasure.

  Yes, Adam clung to his dwarfed uneasy self. You might say it had burrowed down in him, gone underground and as a witness of this there was that novel she was so sure that he was writing—a queer backhanded method of reasserting, reestablishing his dignity, authority. Goodness, think of all the lonely anonymous men and women there were today attempting to do the same thing; why, the novels came off the presses as fast as leaves in autumn falling from the trees and a novel was no matter what its subject matter as authentic a way of telling the tale of self as any that could be thought out.

  Hadn’t she, an old old woman sat down and tried for seven whole years to thrust into novelistic form the story of her life? And why, she’d like to ask herself had she when it was finished locked it up in that desk drawer and never had the nerve to look at it again? And why now did she have this strong desire to place it in the hands of Adam Stone? Vanity was certainly involved. Adam would have to revise many of his notions about her. She’d have to admit that the idea amused her. Moreover he would, she imagined, discover that it had literary merit. She somehow felt it had. He’d take it in all probability to a publisher and after she was gone it would doubtless see the light of day.

  But beyond all this there was a deeper reason. Didn’t she long to convey to him more intimately than she’d been able to in conversation something that she had realized in their talks together he’d not only held out against but found completely phony—her capacity for reverence, wonder, of which there was in his own constitution not a trace.

  Not a trace, she said, rising with some difficulty to her feet. And was it not about to be extinguished in the human heart? Consternation, though few people would be able to recognize that this was so, standing out as we all somehow did against it, had usurped its place.

  We simply stood aghast, she thought, crossing the room to get the morning paper which she must read before settling down with her manuscript (yes she was now firmly resolved to read it from beginning to end). “An excellent day for such a resolution,” she said, opening the door, taking in the Times and returning with it to her desk.

  Pouring herself a second cup of coffee she sat down and spread the paper on her lap. The headlines sprang at her—the nightmare world in which we lived—all these chimerical events through which we passed. “Impossible, impossible,” she cried—“it staggers the imagination.” But here in large black letters was the announcement—Truman Orders Hydrogen Bomb Built—a fact at the disposal of everyone capable of reading. Within a few hours it would be lodged in the hearts and minds of most of the inhabitants of earth—hundreds of millions of people would quail before it as she was quailing now.

  But who could really comprehend the cryptic data at the core of it? The words were Greek to her as they would be to all but a meager handful of her fellow mortals—concepts of the mind, mathematical measurements, calculations of inconceivable complexity. They affected her in some odd way as though she were reading poetry; the syllables fell so sonorously upon the ear.

  “Molecules composed of two deuterons and a proton.

  Two tritons, a deuteron and a proton,

  A triton and a proton and a proton and a deuteron.

  In one of these six possible combinations—

  Triton—triton, triton—deuteron, triton—proton,

  Or a possible combination of these three

  Lies the secret of the triton bomb.”

  You’d have to possess the brain of Einstein to understand it.

  But here it was—the perfidious, the majestic secret explained if you could get it, and the words dancing with such terrible agility in her mind and heart.

  “The triton bomb

  is the last step

  In a six-step process

  One taking more

  Than s
ix million years.”

  Could it be possible? Could it be humanly possible that the diligent, the honorable search for truth, the inquiry into the secrets of nature and the structure of the Universe would be closed and consummated with this annihilating explanation?

  “The protons are hooked on,

  one by one,

  To an atom of carbon

  Two of the protons

  Losing the positive electron

  And are thus transmuted

  Into an electron—

  As has been seen

  A nucleus of one proton

  And two deuterons

  Is a proton nucleus

  This is by far

  The most powerful reaction

  In nature

  And takes place

  In the sun

  At the rate

  Of four pounds an hour

  A reaction time

  That brings it within

  The range of possibility.”

  The paper dropped from her hands. She threw back her head and closed her eyes. “What is man that Thou art mindful of him or the son of man that Thou visitest him,” she cried aloud.

  TWO

  Patsy had come down to the sidewalk with him. She shivered for she was clothed only in her slacks, a light sweater, and a pair of huaraches. “There’s the precious manuscript,” she said, placing a well-stuffed folder in the laden pushcart that stood against the curb. Adam took it angrily from where it lay exposed to wind and rain, and repacking it with great solicitude in a nest of similar folders, turned to speak to her. But she’d gone without so much as saying goodbye. He could see her through the open door of the tenement house fleeing up the stairs to her own little flat on the third floor. To be sure, she’d offered to go along with him, and help him unpack his things. But he’d turned her down flat. “No, you don’t, my little bitch,” he’d said—the word had escaped him. There had been something in the way he’d said it that had, he expected, as good as terminated the whole affair.

  He resented the note of sarcasm with which she referred to his manuscript. He was done with Patsy. He surveyed the cart on which his goods and chattels were now untidily stowed away. The sight of the familiar objects was discouraging enough. How many times they’d gone with him from one place to another. A reproduction of van Gogh’s Old Shoes peeped at him from behind an alarm clock, and a portion of Picasso’s Clowns emerged from his old trench coat. God, how many books. There was his old victrola with a crank to wind up the turntable and a few albums of fine records. His radio was wrapped in a blanket. How had he ever managed to acquire these possessions, to move them from one place to another?

  The desolation that invaded him for the moment swallowed up his wrath. The sheer discomfort of digging into new quarters, unpacking and placing his books, setting up a table for his typewriter, rigging up some kind of contraption where he could cook, accustoming himself to the unfamiliar chairs, the unfamiliar bed, the general disorder and despair. A rut he could endure, but to meet with new contingencies—that’s what got him down. It was Patsy who had found the room; she had even offered to go along with him and help him settle in. “But no you don’t,” he said grimly, starting to push his cart through Jones Street into Bleecker, “no, you don’t, my little bitch,” and at this moment, turning east on Bleecker, a flight of pigeons wheeling all together and catching on their tilted wings some diffusion of brightness from the breaking clouds seemed to illuminate not only the dark skies but the murk and drabness of the February day. They gleamed and disappeared behind the belfry of Our Lady of Pompeii, just as Adam, all but knocked down by a heavy truck, and answering with peculiar vehemence the curses of the driver who had forced him and his pushcart against the curb, experienced an extraordinary instant. Half a dozen or more doors opening in his heart while he passed through as many moments in memory, and an accumulation of loneliness, a quite unutterable sense of his uniqueness flooding the present instant, brought him so intense a consciousness of all he’d learned of misery, despair and solitude that he seemed to have acquired nothing short of spiritual treasure. Hounded by misfortune, accustomed by some ill star that pursued him to the kicks and bludgeonings of fate, he would grind out of the misery and torture a work of art; he’d wrench a masterpiece from all that life had meted out to him. So, turned back upon himself—for he was a young man, he felt, quite sure of genius—ravenously devouring his experience and his bitterness, brushing the mud from several books that had been jostled from the cart, continuing his virulent exchange of curses and obscenities with the driver of the truck, he received so vivid and immediate a sense of his own predicament, all the vicissitudes of his late affair with Patsy, that, scrapping half the material of his novel now in progress, he determined that he would place the first big chapter of his book right here, in this very moment—Bleecker Street, with the low ramshackle houses, the dormer windows, the tenements, the pushcarts, the fruit and vegetable stands, the Italian vendors, women marketing, children and baby carriages, the street cries, the mud and drizzle. He’d make you smell and see and hear and live with it. And in the midst of the animated scene, he’d place himself, a young man with his goods and chattels in a pushcart, shoved up against the curbing while these profanities came pouring fresh from the wells of his misery and anger—getting square with Patsy, getting square with life.

  The traffic jam broke up, the trucks rolled on. Seeing an opportunity to cross the street, Adam maneuvered his cart to the opposite curbing and looking up saw the pigeons flying in close formation emerge from the clouds a second time and wheel behind the belfry and the golden cross. God, he’d snare those pigeons too, shedding their light from the cloud just like the Holy Ghost descending on the Village, and he’d introduce that newsstand there between the pushcarts with the morning papers and the headlines in English and Italian, shouting out their joyous message—the great big beautiful news about the great big beautiful bomb, the absolute weapon to blow the human race to Kingdom Come.

  As he nipped into Morton Street, pushing his cart in the direction of Seventh Avenue, the truck driver’s abuse and his own foulmouthed rejoinders mingling with the rhythms of the headlines, “Truman Orders Hydrogen Bomb Built,” still visualizing pigeons and pushcarts, fruits and vegetables, the belfry and the golden cross, and seeing as though he stood before him in the flesh Philip Ropes, with his chestnut-colored curls, that Byronic throat, the collar open at the neck, and remembering Patsy naked on her bed, her delicate fragile body white as a camellia, the soft red pubic hair, the red curls exquisite beneath her arms, he seized upon the plight of the planet with a kind of ungodly glee—(just another item to throw into that magnificent chapter). He’d feed that chapter all he had—this first day of February 1950—H Day, Hell Day, Hydrogen Bomb Day, call it what you like; but it was this sweet, the acute, bitter business of the individual life that mattered. Making scenes, drawing pictures, holding imaginary conversations, he saw a series of astounding chapters, his entire novel unfolding as he marched along.

  It would not be a shallow, just a surface novel. He’d throw one value up against another. He’d experienced plenty—plenty. And here for some reason or another, Mol got trammeled up in the big rush of his memories and reflections—My Old Lady—Mol—poor intense emotional Miss Sylvester. He could see her now with her big eyes and her highfalutin talk. He knew just how she’d agonize about it. It couldn’t be—it simply couldn’t be. The great mistake, the greatest mistake in history, Mol opined, the using of the bomb at Hiroshima. How she’d gone on about it—protesting so violently, unable to see how anyone could disagree with her. Well, if she’d marched through France or Flanders and seen those hundreds of bombers in their ordered flight moving morning after morning with spectacular promptitude into the sky—roaring like a thousand trains of cars into her field of vision and out again, on their way to Berlin, to Dresden, to Nuremberg, to murder the mothers and the babies and the children and the old people—to destroy the factories and the railroads, to
soften up the job for the artillery—if she’d thrown her hat in air and cheered them day after day till the breath was drawn clean from her lungs, she might be ready to shrug her shoulders now, and say, what’s the difference—a thousand bombers, or one bomber with the one big beautiful bomb—what did it matter?

  Here he was, at any rate, on this first of February, in his lone and penniless condition, with the check on Philip Ropes the third, which he had intended to tear up but which as a matter of fact reposed in his pocket at the present moment fairly burning a hole in his pants.

  Philip Ropes the third, for Christ’s sake—he hauled up at Seventh Avenue and waited for the lights to change—there was actually no reason why he shouldn’t cash that check. Patsy owed him the money. And if she’d paid him with a check on Philip Ropes, why be so stiff about it? The whole blamed business was over between them. Let Patsy go and do Ropes’s typing. Miss Patricia Smith—Typing and Steno-graphy—Manuscripts—Public Accounting—that was how she advertised herself in the paper (a writer who couldn’t type his own manuscripts was in any case a pain in the neck) and here Adam suddenly closed his eyes a moment trying to black out the pictures that flashed into his mind, for he did not see Patsy stiff and attentive, with her pencil poised for dictation, nor did he see her at a typewriter with her nimble fingers playing swiftly over the keys—no indeed—God no, he saw her lying on Philip Ropes’s couch, beautiful and naked, and Philip Ropes beside her, beautiful and naked too—that camellia-white body, those delicately-molded thighs, that soft red pubic hair, and her mouth (the taste of Patsy’s lips), the flowerlike opening mouth. God, that was what he’d paid her for. He was dead certain of it, though she’d sworn it was not the case. And how the devil could she expect him to play pimp to Philip Ropes? Lord, he’d starve before he’d cash that check. He could beat his way until he got the money from the government—only another week until the gi check came in. A man could beg. The successful beggars were always the young men who looked as though they’d had an education, whose clothes and shoes and general appearance suggested a decent background. The poor fellows, reduced to this. All they had to do was to hold out the hand an hour or more. He could work a district where nobody had ever seen his face—upper Broadway around the Seventies. That’s what he would do. Everything would be scheduled, everything sacrificed for work.